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Comment Why users drop open source (Score 1) 891

It's really much simpler than people here think ---- most working people value their time and in such cases it is simply far more efficient to purchase a product that "just works" than to spend many hours (if not days or long) futzing with an open source product that has to be installed, is fiddley, and, quite often, just doesn't finish what it has started. The actual cost of a commerical product is generally negligible compared to other factors in play. If you're in the open source world, you're not motivated by money, at least not directly. Therefore, that last 10% that takes 90% of the effort often doesn't happen. It's why the user interface of products like the gimp don't come close to commerical products like photoshop or the many other commerical image processing apps out there. It's why that community does not understand the priorities of most users. Most (i.e., 99.xxx% of) users just don't care about the "joy" of the open source world, and even many who are technically knowledgeable (I'm one of those) just don't want to spend a significant amount of their time trying to make other peoples' stuff work. Apple understands this deeply. The technical community "laughed" when Apple finally included copy/paste in the iPhone. But instead of chuckling about Apple being late to the table, they should have understood that Apple recognized that most users just didn't need the feature. How many people do you think choose not to buy an iPhone because it didn't have copy/paste? Very few. Apple (and most successful companies) understand what motivates general users. Most of the technical community does not.

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